TechCrunch’s article pitching Mendeley’s open API against Elsevier’s closed API is flawed but it’s worth reading for the comments it provoked, particularly from Elsevier’s Director of Platform Integration, Ale De Vries. You can read more about the growth of Mendeley’s API service on the Guardian Technology blog – it’s interesting to note that their future plans involve developing their API service into a multi-directional dataflow that will allow applications built on their API to talk to each other and to upload data to Mendeley.

Seb Chan’s candid blogpost reflecting on the Cooper-Hewitt Design Center’s experience of openly releasing their collection metadata is a useful and timely reminder that a) issues around the quality of released metadata need to be addressed if we want anyone to use the data we’re releasing and b) “collection metadata [has value as a tool for discovery] but it is not the collection itself.” Seb’s point about museum collections being no match for the comprehensiveness of libraries and archives highlights the importance of open metadata, by enabling cross-institutional aggregation, and the work of OCLC and Europeana’s ‘semantic similarity’ project I mentioned above. In an ideal world it will also enable the public permeability that Seb touches on by connecting our collections with the boundless ‘amateur web’ corpus.